A Sacred Remembrance

Shavuot was the day my grandmother arrived in Auschwitz.

On Shavuot she lit the candles. So many candles, melting into wax puddles in their flimsy silver tins. The small flames were a thin pale blue like the veins on the back of her hand. To me they were nameless and faceless, just empty heat and flickering light. But not to her.

To her those candles were people. They were family. Sometimes whole families, who had worked and struggled and lived and died. Aunts and uncles. And cousins, with whom she had played and shared and fought and laughed. To her this was a sacred duty, this remembrance.

In the cozy cheerful kitchen, cheesecakes cooled on the counter and blintzes fried happily in the pan. But here in the cool darkness of the dining room at the long mahogany table my grandmother sat to talk. Her hands shook slightly in her lap, but her voice when she spoke was steady.

“Remember good this day. This will be your parents’ yahrtzeit.” And so it was.

“You know, for the Hungarian Jews, Shavuot is special. But not special good, special bad. You understand why? Because that is the day we arrived. Over there. In Auschwitz.” She said that when she got to the barracks, dazed and confused, the Blockaltester told her roughly, “Remember good this day. This will be your parents’ yahrtzeit.”

And so it was.

She remembered the barking dogs, and the thick black smoke and the screaming. She remembered the long step down from the platform. Beside her a woman carried a jar of homemade lekvar, another clutched an antique brooch. My grandmother held her baby tightly in her arms. “Such a beautiful child, so blonde,” she said. “His cheeks were soft like velvet.”

She remembered the inmate in her tattered striped uniform, leaning to whisper in her ear. “Give the child to your mother. It will be better for both of them.” She remembered the stinging burn of her newly shaved scalp and the shoes lined up neatly against a wall. She remembered seeing her baby son beckoning to her with his tiny fingers from the shelter of his grandmother’s arms, as though to say, “Come, Mommy.” She called out to him, “I am coming, Peter. Wait! I am coming.” She said she tried to reach him. She only found out later that the man in the handsome suit at the head of the lines, the man with the heavy walking stick, was Josef Mengele.

She said she used her best German and her most polished voice when she spoke. “Bitte, Ich vill mit meine kinde gain” -- Please, I want to go with my child. She said that all the handsomeness disappeared from his face as he laughed at her. He answered, “Gai mitt deiner shvesteren, die blitte Judische kee” -- Go with your sisters, you fat Jewish cow. Then he lazily waved his hand, left, right, and mother and son were separated forever.

“Who kills babies?” she asks me now, her hands clenching and unclenching. “The child did not even know yet that he was a Jew.”

She said that she met her uncle there. His job was to pull the bodies from the gas chambers and load them into the crematorium. She said there was an endless emptiness in his eyes. He told her that he had burned, in one day, his wife and three small children. He told her, also, that he had found a siddur and hidden it. He wanted her to have it but she said no. She was too afraid to keep it. If it was found, they would certainly kill her. Later, she spoke with her sister and her sister-in-law and they agreed it was worth the risk. They would keep one page of the siddur.

She said they wrapped it in cloth and plastic and hid it in their mouths. And it traveled with them, beneath their tongues, as they went from line to line, roll call to roll call, camp to camp, for months. “We took the page with the Wayfarer's Prayer.” For were they not truly wandering Jews?

She worked without shoes in snow, and rain and hail. She unloaded cement blocks from a train.

“It happened like so,” she said quietly. “For their holiday season they were very merry. This merriness made them softer a little, even to us. And they gave us, for a gift, bars of soap. And we didn’t know. It wasn’t our fault.” She said that when they finally came home, to Budapest, the Chevra Kaddisha told them where the soap came from, told them that it was made of Jewish fat, Jewish flesh. Then they wrapped the small slivers that remained in tachrichim, burial shrouds, and buried the soap. The flesh of the ones who didn’t come home.

I listen, my eyes down, fingering the lacy tablecloth.

“What was a person over there?” she asks me. Her voice is thick with scorn and sorrow. “We were not human beings. We were animals. We looked like it and we were it. When we passed by, they spat at us.” Sometimes, the officers brought company to the camp. Sometimes they had small parties. “We saw them. Elegant people with fur coats and top hats, and we cried. We were human beings once too, but now we washed ourselves with water from the toilet.”

She said that they kept their eyes on the floor for bits of charcoal or burnt wood which could help those suffering from stomach pain. She said that they scavenged for beet peels from the troughs of the officer’s pigs, to rub on their cheeks. Sometimes, she said, a pink cheek could mean the difference between life and death. “Also, we stole. What we could put our hands on, we stole.”

She said that this is the wisdom of women, this peculiar intuition for salvation, the knowledge of how to stay alive. She said that the men did not know these secrets and so they died. “They were bigger than us and stronger than us, but they did not know how to save themselves.” Every day, wheelbarrows carted piles of dead men to the pits.

She remembered Tzeilappel, the roll calls, hours of standing in place in the bitter cold, of counting and re-counting. She remembered the planes flying overhead. “At the end, there was nothing for us to do. No work, no nothing.”

"What did you speak about?" I ask her.

“We talked of the things women talk about, always. Recipes and gardens, our babies and our mothers.” Above their heads, she said, “the sky was silver with planes. But they did not come for us.”

In the morning the whole camp was gray, covered with a fine coating of ash. “It was in your hair, it was in your mouth. And such a bad smell!"

She is silent for a time, considering. “The worst day, I think, was when they brought in the Lodz ghetto.” All that day and into the night the camp was filled with the wailing of the women, the sobbing sounds of children. And then there was only silence. In the morning, she said, the whole camp was gray, covered with a fine coating of ash. “It was in your hair, it was in your mouth. And such a bad smell! Up in the sky you could see, still, the fires burning.” She looks down for a moment at the thin skin of her hands. “All of them, that night, perished.”

One day an officer’s horse collapsed in the yard. And that very night they snuck out into the courtyard and brought back its head. In the darkness, on their thin cots they ate the meat of the horse’s jaw. She said that they picked the gums clean, she and her sister, until nothing was left but the teeth and the bone. Her father had told her, “Eat everything you can! It is a mitzvah to stay alive.”

She said they tried to observe whatever they could keep. On Passover they ate only potatoes and gave away their thin slices of bread. On Tisha B’Av they ate nothing at all.

She said that all week long they saved small pieces of margarine and when Friday night came they would put it on the floor and light it. “It burned for only a minute but we made a bracha. And for that little minute, it was Shabbos.”

I guess she must have seen the question in my eyes, because then she said, “What should I say to you Yael? Or you believe in Him, or you don’t. Me? I believe.”

The opinions expressed in the comment section are the personal views of the commenters. Comments are moderated, so please keep it civil.

Visitor Comments: 18

(18)
Sherrie,
November 15, 2011 11:04 PM

Made me cry this one did!

I read this not quite a year ago & every once in a while, for some strange reason, I'll come back & read it again. It's just a beautiful account of someone's history. I still can't help but wonder why the women would want to add beet juice o their cheeks? to look healthier or prettier???

(17)
Patty Vieira,
June 15, 2010 10:35 PM

The Shame of Mankind

What can I say besides that mankind is evil? How can we do this to others?We were supposed to be rational...
That's why we can't let this happen ever again! There are evil people trying to hurt the jews. I will defend my ancestors untill the end. I will help and support the race that G'd chose forever. G'd will fight with us, and we will have the victory!

especially when my maternal grandmother lost, as I understand it, most of her family. even though I was totally non-observant as a child these stories always tear me up. Now that I am becoming observant it really hits home. Yet we continually hear of those who wish and try to deny this ever happened. We can not and we can not allow the rest of the world to attempt to deny what happened.
We all to bless their memories.

(14)
Aryeh,
May 20, 2010 9:27 AM

Remembering - coincidence

What a coincidence - just yesterday night, moza"shavuot, my wife told me that on shavuot her mother a"h, family and others were expeled to Auschwitz.
My mother in law was Hungarian.
My mothr a"h was from Kielze, Poland and she came to Israel with her parents before the war. She had brothers and sisters who stayed in Poland were in living Lodz and one brother was in Warshaw - in and out of the ghetto.
Dena's husband's parents of comment 3, has the same background.
I'd be thankful if she or he would contact me on my Email - laaryeh@walla.com
I

(13)
ruth berkovits,
May 18, 2010 5:39 PM

Parents also have yahrzeit and how they saved themselves

My mother and father are thank HaShem alive. They both are survivors and have numbers on their arms.
My father's numbers equal to Yud Kai Vov Kai
and was freed the last day of Pesach while cooking a potato. He was freed by the Russians. My father reminds every Pesach of his freedom. I always joke with him that the potato is still cooking. He was also given a bracha by the Minchas Elazar (The Munkatcher
Rebbe ZTZ'L for a long life when he was young yeshiva bochur. My mother has the numbers on her arm equal to the numerical value of Chai. She survived in the camps with a siddur. One day during roll call she was in middle of Shmona Esrai. A guard
came in and did not see her otherwise she would have been punished severly. That siddur went with her to Sweden where she met my father. They are zoche to be great grandparents to wonderful grandchildren. Have a gut yom tov to everyone.

(12)
Ellen,
May 18, 2010 8:07 AM

One's value is not influenced by what others do to you

Hashem decides the intrinsic value of a human being. The worth of someone who is victimized does not diminish by bad treatment.
Just as one gets some merit from the good deeds that result from his good actions, someone who causes averot is held responsible.
And they will certainly be held responsible for making human beings feel like animals. They may have looked good in furs and jewels, but their behavior was unspeakable.
The value of our deeds changes with what we do when we have free moral choices, not our intrinsic value.

(11)
yaffa shilman,
May 18, 2010 3:02 AM

amazing!

As we all bustle around gathering ingredients for blintzes and cheesecakes, this story is a reminder to stop and remember our past. Our grandmothers who survived, the children who didn't, the people who started all over again after losing everything. We should always make every moment count.

(10)
Lisa,
May 17, 2010 7:01 PM

Retelling only reiterates...

Just last week my mother said that she was observing the yahrzeit of her whole family on Shavuot.
How can these events be denied when the retelling is so brutal and painful to hear and comprehend...

(9)
Anonymous,
May 17, 2010 5:38 AM

Holocaust experiences when you weren't there

I was reading last week about people that has dreams of the Holocaust; when they were not there or even born yet. Your Grandmother and people that survived through this it would be understandable. I found it interesting reading what other people have been going through for I have similar experiences; but not through dreams. These people give accounts of dreams of actually being there. Could these dreams be from studies of the Holocaust? Movies they have seen and they dream about them? Or could it be giving a message to them about what is going on behind the scences or being around people that hate Jews like the Nasis? While I'm awake I can hear the sirens of the trucks. Over 20 yrs ago I watched a movie on the Holocaust with those trucks sirens. I've only noticed hearing this, this past year. Anyone else ever having any Holocaust experiences when you didn't live through it? What do you think they mean?

(8)
Zela,
May 17, 2010 4:42 AM

We need constant reminders- as deniers are out there, always

Although I have read countless books and articles and visited museum after museum, I am still unable to swallow teh enormity of evil that filled our universe for three long years, daily murdering babies and others for no reason at all. What a difference there is in this world we are now in, where a preemie is bustled over and has every possible thing done to maintain its life.
But it does not take much to turn the tide and I belive the discrimination of Jews is ever present, it is just a matter of to what degree and how openly it is shown.
I see subtle differences in our Federal government and sometimes not so subtle, following our economic crisis. Jews are openly mocked and given harsher treatment in the Judicial system.
Do not trust any government to protect you. Only Hashem is our guard.
May your grandmother have much Yiddishe nachas and tell her story to one and all, lest we forget. I would tape her conversation for eternity.

(7)
Tamara Zaidenweber,
May 16, 2010 11:49 PM

To all the survivors: You are my number one heroes!

Thank you for sharing. I just hope that not only jewish people read those lines. It is very necessary to remember so we teach our kids and grandkids what our grandparents had to go through.

(6)
Eli,
May 16, 2010 9:15 PM

Mi Kiamcha Yisroel -- WHo is like you Israel/

My neighbor-a "lager yid" made yuhrtzeit this morning in shul for his entire family, murdered al kiddush H-shem. He spoke, and we listened-you could hear a pin drop. He described how the Nazis ym"sh came to his door and gave 5 minutes to grab something and get out of the house. You have a wife and a large family and only 5 minutes, what do you take? he asked us rhetorically. His father grabbed his tallis and teffilin and with the remaining time managed to grab one loaf of bread-for a large family on a 3 day journey. He was 18 at the time and it made a tremendous impression on him. When he had the opportunity, he snuck in a pair of teffilin and put it on almost every day-a crime punishable by death. But he survived. No parent , brother sister or even aunt or uncle survived. But today he has great grandchildren. Mi kiamcha yisroel?

(5)
Anonymous,
May 16, 2010 7:38 PM

Shoah memories

every story must be told and each is both unique and similar. we shall never forget.
May all the souls of the Dead rest in peace.

(4)
Chaya Weisberg,
May 16, 2010 7:21 PM

thank you for sharing your experience

Dear Irene,
I'm sure it's so terrible to revisit those memories. Thank you for going back there to share it with us. I appreciate how real and vivid what you've shared is. Being a young mother I felt connected to your story. My grandfather was married with 3 children as well and was the only survivor of his family and it helped me get a tiny inkling into what that was like. You are my heroes. How did you have the courage/ ability/ faith/ motivation to go on and start anew in every sense? and to build a family? It's so amazing to me. Hashem should bless you with serenity and pride for all you've done and please continue to share.
Sincerely,
Chaya Weisberg

(3)
Dena,
May 16, 2010 7:21 PM

Powerful

That was a very powerful essay.
Thanks for writing it!
Gave me more insight into my Hungarian mother in law who survived Auschwitz a"h endured and my father in law a"h who was in the Lodz ghetto, also a survivor of Auschwitz.
They both came out of the war with their faith as intact and unshakable as ever.

(2)
dov ben essine,
May 16, 2010 3:13 PM

how was it possible

The Nazis were the instruments getting rid od the Jews ans other deemed undesirables,Let us not forget they impelmented the final slution of the hated Jews,However the corner stone was laid down 1500 years before with simelar autrocities when the catholic church.cristianity raised its voice,

(1)
Melissa Groman,
May 16, 2010 1:40 PM

The last line has stayed with me since the first time I read this...

So vivid, so necessary and so vital that you write the way you do. May their memories be for a blessing.

I’ve been dating a young woman for the past two years and we are starting to think about marriage. The problem is that she is not Jewish. I would want her to convert, but in a way where there would be no doubt about its validity, so that we and our kids don’t have problems later on. How do you recommend that I proceed?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

I appreciate your desire to do the right thing and proceed in an authentic way.

The process of conversion is challenging and involves a process of a year or two. This benefits the person converting, to ensure he fully appreciates the responsibilities he is taking on.

According to the Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Aruch), a valid conversion replicates the experience at Mount Sinai of 3,300 years ago, when the Jewish nation accepted the Torah. For your friend to convert, she must:

believe that Judaism is the true religion, not just accept it by default

study what it says in the Torah

commit to observe all the Torah's commandments

Further, a conversion must be motivated for the sincere purpose of getting close to God and His Torah, not for ulterior motives. Thus, your friend would have to embrace Judaism and the Torah for its own sake, not in order to marry you. She should have the exact same desire to convert even with you entirely out of the picture.

If your friend studies Judaism and feels it is right for her, she would then approach an Orthodox conversion court and explain her situation. The court would then decide if it feels she is a sincere candidate for conversion. If yes, she would begin the lengthy process of studying and practicing to become a true convert.

Of course, to have a successful relationship, you will also need a high level of appreciation and commitment to Judaism. Perhaps you could begin your own study program to discover how Torah values enhance our lives and form the bedrock of civilization.

You should endeavor to live near a Jewish community which has adult education programs, rabbis you can consult with, Shabbat hospitality programs, etc.

In 1273 BCE (Jewish year 2488), Moses completed his farewell address to the Jewish people, and God informed Moses that the day of his death was approaching (Deut. 31:14). Amazingly, the anniversary of Moses' completing his teaching coincides with the date in 1482 of the first printing of the standard format used for Jewish Bibles today: vowel signs, accents, translation (Targum), and Rashi commentary.

Lack of gratitude is at the root of discontent. In order to be consistently serene, we must master the attribute of being grateful to the Creator for all His gifts. As the Torah (Deuteronomy 26:11) states, "Rejoice with all the good the Almighty has given you." This does not negate our wanting more. But it does mean that we have a constant feeling of gratitude since as long as we are alive, we always have a list of things for which to be grateful.

[Solomon] was wiser than all men (I Kings 5:11), even wiser than fools (Midrash).

What does the Midrash mean by "wiser than fools"?

A man of means was once a Sabbath guest at the home of the Chofetz Chaim. He insisted upon paying the sage in advance for the Sabbath meals - an insulting demand. To everyone's surprise, the Chofetz Chaim accepted the money.

After the Sabbath the Chofetz Chaim forced the guest to take the money back. He explained, "Had I refused to accept the money before the Sabbath, the thought that he was imposing upon me might have distracted from the man's enjoying the spirit of the Sabbath. Although it was foolish of him to feel this way, I wished to put his mind at rest."

Not everyone thinks wisely all the time. Some people have foolish ideas. Yet if we oppose them, they may feel they have been wronged. Insisting on the logic of our own thinking may not convince them in the least. In such instances, it may require great wisdom to avoid offending someone, yet not submitting to his folly.

By accepting his guest's money, knowing that he would return it to him after the Sabbath, the Chofetz Chaim wisely accommodated this man's whim without compromising on his own principles.

A wise person may be convinced by a logical argument, but outsmarting a fool truly requires genius.

Today I shall...

try to avoid offending people whom I feel to be in the wrong, without in any way compromising myself.

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